Vincent Gallo is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being Film Freak Central has ever known
got the call in the middle of a morning screening that a moderator was needed that evening at Denver's Starz Filmcenter for a Q&A after a sold-out screening of Vincent Gallo's notorious The Brown Bunny. After a second screening, a lot of juggling, and a little soul-searching, and with a little less than two hours to research and prepare, I agreed to do it. I'd never met Vincent Gallo before, but his reputation for combativeness bordering on cruelty preceded him; and though I took his side in private in his blow-up with Roger Ebert after last year's disastrous Cannes Film Festival screening of a workprint of his picture, I confess that I've never been more nervous to interview someone.
It's not the hostility of a few of the comments he's made in the press about the press that unnerved me, it was that element of the complete unknown. It's sticking your hand in that mound-thing in Flash Gordon: on the one hand, he seems the agent provocateur by design; on the other, he demonstrates moments of extreme kindness and grace. Then there's his resume: gifted musician whose album When is probably the best thing I've heard in five years; gifted artist who was hailed by many to be the finest painter to emerge from a New York Bohemian underground scene that included Jean-Michel Basquiat (with whom he started a band called Gray), Julian Schnabel, and Andy Warhol; producer of some of P.J. Harvey's extraordinary work; I'm-assuming-one-time lover of the brilliant Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power), who dedicated a song, "Mr. Gallo," to him on her album Dear Sir; professional motorcycle racer; skilled sculptor and metal-worker who was on the scene the first weeks after 9/11 to help with the removal of girders and wreckage; maker of some eleven mix tapes for William S. Burroughs; and one of the enduring figures in the Calvin Klein campaign shot by Richard Avedon. Lest we forget his contributions to the cinema: his directorial debut Buffalo '66, one of the best films of 1998; Abel Ferrara's The Funeral (in which he had a small but integral role), one of the best films of the '90s; and Trouble Every Day, the very best picture of 2001.
Vincent Gallo is also the man whose sharp, mordant, dry wit led him to respond to a report that his Buffalo '66 star Christina Ricci had gotten drunk and pissed on a carpet with "What, again? Was she eating a slice of pizza?" The man who placed a hex on Ebert's prostate, whose remorselessly conservative politicism has earned him the ire of a great many of his colleagues in the art world, and who lists as his heroes the bassist from Yes, Pasolini…and Richard Nixon. Vincent Gallo straddles a line. On one side of it he's Svengali-charming, a consummate storyteller, a master politician with a level of charisma that is, frankly, scary. On the flipside of it, he's dark, self-destructive–nasty, even. But he's always whip-smart, always brutally incisive. Always, despite glaring continuity problems, genuinely passionate. He's not burning the candle at both ends; he's thrown the candle into the fire.
And The Brown Bunny has drawn a great deal of fire, partially for a ten-minute fellatio scene in which actress Chloë Sevigny actually blows Mr. Gallo, but mostly for being audacious enough to offend both Ebert and A.O. Scott. It's another victim of the strange sanctimony that made Janet Jackson's forty-year-old tit the poster-appendage for America's decline into immorality. It's ironic that much of the right-wing ideology that Gallo defends so fervently and so eloquently has contributed to the pre-condemnation of a picture that few people in the United States have even seen.
he day that I meet Vincent Gallo is the same day a huge billboard of the most famous BJ since that one in the Oval Office, erected on Sunset Blvd. next to Chateau Marmont Hotel, is removed under pressure from community leaders. Once he'd apologized for being a little late (he was on the air at the local Fox affiliate talking about said conflagration), Gallo began to rail at the liberal leaders at Regency Outdoor Advertising:
"They took my money, they knew what they were putting up–it was fucking sixty feet for fuck's sake–and they were in on it every step along the way: the design, the execution. The liberals, they like to pay a lot of lip-service to freedom of expression, freedom of speech, the art, the art they'll say–but when there's money involved, when there's the threat of losing contracts, they're the first ones jumping out of the way. I based all of my advertising around that billboard, it was a big investment for me and now I'm in really big trouble. Really big trouble."
That level of insecurity and fear is disarming coming from Gallo. It fed into my fear of the unexpected. I wondered for a while if it wasn't manufactured–after all, the best thing that could happen to The Brown Bunny would be if Ebert continued to act like a jilted date and if the Puritans picketed Rodeo Drive. Yet I think Mr. Gallo–the rock star, the supermodel, the (gasp) filmmaker–may actually be this innocent. It was far from the arrogant, cocksure figure that he cut through countless interviews–that his art represented to me. I came to understand in spending an evening with him that it was insecurity and fear that fuelled his self-described "pathological" compulsions and obsessions. Without them, you know, Gallo would be at peace.
e tells funny stories now about his horrific childhood, his abusive father and a controlling mother who didn't let him decorate his own room as a child, something that he points to as explanation for his fanatical mien on set and in the editing room. He's at war with himself and his image, engaged in a constant flux of image construction and destruction. But that doesn't strike me as disingenuous with Mr. Gallo–it strikes me instead as intensely vulnerable and ineffably human. Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" Gallo is a contradiction with a firm handshake and a disarming sense of humour. He's a beautiful man, a great big noisy ball of neurosis. A guy who spent the day of his screening going to thrift stores for something to wear and scouting out seedy motels in which he might spend the night, toting around a print of the film that he's "sweated blood" over in the trunk of his car.
Not to say that The Brown Bunny is a perfect film. In its Warholian non-narrative it in fact defies any convention of "entertainment." The Brown Bunny is, in its Bruno Dumont-meets-Matthew Barney sort of way, a cry from the wilderness of a time when independent cinema wasn't a studio's boutique indulgence, when independent films weren't just mainstream plots performed by Z-list performers and directed by Z-list directors, or, most importantly, when independent films were art instead of try-outs for Hollywood blockbuster assignments. Vincent Gallo is the real deal is what I'm saying. He's not trying to win your affection, a stance that makes his affinity with maverick filmmaker Abel Ferrara a matter of course. Love him or hate him–despite or because of what he says and does.–August 22, 2004
FILM FREAK CENTRAL: You composed a track for Eric Mitchell's The Way It Is (1983) called "And a Colored Sky Colored Grey" that you set to lyrics for the Buffalo '66 soundtrack. In those lyrics, you refer to yourself as the "chairman of lonely boys." Tell me about that.
VINCENT GALLO: Thanks for noticing that, I don't know that anyone's ever asked me about that–or even noticed it, but to be lonely, to be lonesome, that state of being for me is really familiar–it's the only one that I know intimately. Let me tell you the circumstances around setting lyrics to that track. It was desperation, savage, simple desperation. There were songs that I wanted to use that I wasn't able to get licensing permission for, for Buffalo, and time was running out and money was running out.
I imagine it's hard for you to get permissions given the subject matter of your films.
It's impossible, almost, really–made harder because I don't have any publicists, I don't have an agent, I don't have a manager, I don't have anyone who can help me make it seem more reasonable. I had to draft a new letter for every product placement I could. I had to give ten, sometimes twenty page synopses of The Brown Bunny just so I could use a McDonald's bag. "Yeah, it's a story of this motorcycle racer who misses his girlfriend and drives cross country…" It was hard, man, I had to figure out myself how to skew the picture to make it most friendly to McDonald's or Coke or whatever. Other pictures they're driving out cases of the shit or doing the catering–mine, I had to sweat blood.
And the permissions folks aren't nice, I've heard.
No. In fact their only job is to be the nastiest, most horrible people in the whole world. They have nothing else to do but be cruel and brutal. I can appreciate a straight deal: "Mr. Gallo, you need the song, it's fifty grand. Pay it." But it's more like I would call and say, "Excuse me, um, my name is Vince Gallo, I've made a film, um, and I was wondering if I could use this song that, um, only three people in the world have a record of it." And they wouldn't say "yes" or "no," they'd say, "I don't like the way you asked that. And we have a lot of things going on, sir, and I can't talk to you right now." From there it took a year-and-a-half sometimes to get the music for Brown Bunny. [With] Buffalo '66 in the last minute somebody never came through, the paperwork was never sent through, so the last minute I had to go to the soundstage and rehash some of my stuff to put into the picture.
Aren't you happy with the result?
Ultimately I was, ultimately I was. But at the time I just sang in the mixing studio, just sort of improvised over the piece, tried to stay in character. I felt I was speaking on behalf of Billy Brown, the character. I was really sincere about what I was saying, how I was feeling. It was the first time I'd ever recorded a vocal track. It's really hokey, but I found that it was interesting that the character is singing a song over the credits at the end of his movie.
I counted about seven tracks on your Recordings of Music for Film that had the word "brown" in them. Coupled with Billy Brown and now The Brown Bunny, what is it about brown?
(laughs) Brown. There's nothing scatological, I promise you. It's a beautiful colour, and it's an underrated colour. But the reason I really like it is that there was a girl when I was young, Jolie Brown. I liked her a whole lot so I like the name "brown." Also, all those girls in the brownie uniforms, they were right at the age that I started to like girls so that made an impact, too. The Girl Scouts, I didn't like their uniforms as much, too militant, but the brown uniforms were nice.
What is it about girls?
(laughs) Right, well, I'm really influenced by girls. I was into girls. I liked a lot of girls growing up. Part of being interested in cinema, in photography, in life, was that I was interested in different women and girls that I liked a lot. I started watching movies initially with a different focus primarily because I was interested in some female performers in a strong, sexual way. I wanted to watch them over and over. My mom was a hairdresser who had a beauty parlour in our house and we had no books, we had no records, we had no radio, we had a little black-and-white television that my father controlled, and so that was the show for me. It was this parade of ladies getting made-over and their hair done in my living room but it was also the beauty magazines that were lying around. I would say that the fashion photography of that time, the way people were presented, I really developed a strong idea of what I liked–a real consistent theme that I would be drawn back to.
Edward Albee talks about a deck of pornographic trading cards that a child discovers: Does it generate the eroticism, or does eroticism eroticize the playing cards?
Right. To illustrate that, people always ask me about film as if it's films that influenced me as a filmmaker. But it's really not true. I like movies a lot, I have more films on tape than any of my friends. But I'm not really a collage artist like Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson. I'm not like those other guys, Spike Jonze, too, guys who watch things and take notes. I'm trapped in my own stubborn world over-and-over, looking for a similar insight, a similar aesthetic, a similar point of view. It developed so young.
And more as a consequence of your mother's influence than your father's?
I think so. Another thing, my mother didn't let me fix up my room in any way. She made it puffy and fluffy and flowery, and I had to hide my things. My guitar and hi-fi couldn't be out. And the textures weren't that nice, either, lots of polys on the bedding, a great big thick horrible poly-type sheet that had things on the pillow, flowers and things, so that imprints were imbedded on my cheeks in the morning. And it was clean, pathologically clean, she was constantly in there vacuuming and picking on me, and I had to share it with my brother, my sister, and my grandfather. So it was a really weird scene–my grandfather had a wooden leg. It was bizarre. So when I got out of the house, I realize that I've spent my life trying to control my environment, to create a world that I could control in every way that I can. I've spent more time renovating my 300-square foot little apartment in New York–I've done it over like sixty times and I've got it exactly the way that I want it. It's an overwhelming amount of time spent on arrangement and manipulation of space and objects. I spent two-and-a-half years setting up a recording studio, outfitting it with exotic equipment, working on it, modifying it, getting it to perfect in a way that I decided what perfect is–and then I'd record it in six days and it'd be done.
How does that translate into directing?
Well, The Brown Bunny was two-and-a-half years again of preparation: cameras, lenses, the motorcycles, racing again. I spent more time painting the motorcycles I use in this film than I spent on the entirety of Buffalo '66. I really tried to get all the pieces exactly right so that I could control my world. My mother should have just let me have a Superman bed.
Worse in the editing room?
A lot worse–directing I try to be more collaborative, I don't always succeed, but I recognize the beauty of an accident. But in the editing room I turn into a monster, I think, I'll be with this long line of assistants–because I would estrange each of them, make them cry, and grudges would be held and eventually they had to go–just screaming at them because one frame was missing. I had this really elaborate system of keeping all the frames organized and I'd think I'd be missing one and I'd scream right in the faces of these poor assistants–"Where's that fucking frame? Where is it?" We would have to recomposit feet and feet of footage just so I could find a frame that I probably didn't need, but couldn't do anything more until I found. I'll tell you the truth, I've often wondered why I did those things in that way–it's always so painful.
Gallo doing publicity with Christina Ricci; in The Brown Bunny with Chloë Sevigny
"My mother should have just let me have a Superman bed."
You made a mix-tape for William S. Burroughs, and he sent you a "Thank You" postcard for it. What was on the mix, and what was your relationship with Burroughs?
We were lovers. (laughs) No, just kidding. John Giorno, William's friend, I stayed in Burroughs' house a couple of times on the Bowery and John Giorno was living with him at that time. He used to ride around the neighbourhood on his bike and every time I'd walk home, he couldn't see so good, John, and every time he'd see me he'd gay cruise me. And I would always say, "John, it's me," and he'd sort of give a smile and a wave–he was blind and so I was just any other boy on the street. But William was just this funny old guy. I'd never read a word of what he'd written other than the postcards he'd send to me–he sent me like eleven of them–but we had several chats, you know, he had this funny voice. (Gallo proceeds to do a dead-on impersonation of Burroughs, a record played at quarter speed:) "Thank you for this tape that you made that I am listening to right now. Merry Christmas. William." But I'd make him a tape every time he went to Kansas.
Why'd he go to Kansas so much?
I don't know, really. I mean he was this… He looked like a Bowery Bum, y'know–but Kansas, in Kansas he was recovering. I don't know if it was the weather, or if it was that the methadone was cheaper, I don't know why it was Kansas but while he was there he loved contact. He wanted packages and letters so I would make very exotic mix tapes on Christmas and they were extremely iconoclastic tapes. I was listening to the freakiest things that I had ever listened to, and I would send him my own music that was even freakier at that time. And he had a great sensibility, he could relate to things in different ways and it was really nice to have that relationship. He went to Kansas for about a year once, and I went to Italy and there was about three years I didn't see him, so I didn't see him towards the end of his life. When Gus Van Sant did Drugstore Cowboy, I visited him once with Matt Dillon, but other than that, I didn't see him much.
In 1998, Buffalo '66 was rejected by Cannes. In 2003, Cannes was begging for a rough-cut workprint of The Brown Bunny. What changed so drastically in five years?
That was really sad because I really needed them then, in 1998. I really needed them because Buffalo '66 was not sellable, no one was interested at all. I showed it at Sundance but I didn't win any prizes, I was booed there, got a lot of really bad press. People don't remember that now because the film eventually did pretty good for what it was, but I couldn't get any festivals then, I was shut out except for Sundance. The Spirit Awards, all those award things, they made it clear that they were not interested in the film, so my last chance was Cannes. But it turned out that Anjelica Huston was not, um, completely happy with the film either for how she looked, or how she came off, or she didn't get enough roses, or we didn't kiss her ass enough.
She was pretty vocal in her displeasure with you.
Man, let me tell you, there were a lot of things with Anjelica. Every day something else: We needed to change locations once, go down a block, and we asked Ben Gazzara first instead of her or something and that would set her off, all these things. And at some point I told her some things like, "Listen, baby. We got your name, that's all I needed, I got my money. I'll put your wig on a fat truck driver and shoot him from the back." And that's when we had a falling out.
(laughs) And Huston had some pull with the Cannes selection committee?
Apparently she was best friends with then-Cannes president Gilles Jacob and mysteriously I was dis-invited to the Cannes Film Festival. But my reaction to that was fine, fuck it, I'm never making another movie again therefore I'll never go to another film festival again, I'm retired, so fuck Cannes, thank you, goodbye. Buffalo '66 plays, it does whatever it does, and I get offered a lot of things that I turned down until I got funding for The Brown Bunny.
Tell me about that process–half a decade separates your two films.
The screenplay for The Brown Bunny was 77-pages long, but the contract between me and the producers was 111-pages long. It goes into incredible micro-managed, obsessive detail about my control. If the world ends and a new world begins, I control excavation of the master tapes. One of the things, chapter 16, it's about film festivals and it opens with "Over my dead body will the film ever show at the Cannes Film Festival." So when Cannes came calling, I said, "Tell Thierry Fremaux to take his baguette and…" And then suddenly terrible happened. I got a call from the lab. I had planned to do an extremely modern technique of going from Super16mm film to 35mm film. I shot the film with special cameras but they needed to be Super16 for size and for different reasons–budget, for instance. But I needed to do a really radical blow-up. I didn't want to do it optically and I didn't want to do it in a linear, digital scan kind of way. I didn't want the HiDef negative process because I don't like that aesthetically, at least not for what I was doing with this film. I had an opportunity to do it on a system that would be available in the million-dollar range and if I worked with this company to develop the proprietary software, to develop this technique, they'd let me have it for the $250,000 range. So I said, "Okay, great," and I shot this film counting on this.
Then, the hitch.
Well, long around March I get a call from the company from England that there were interfacing problems, some other technical problems, and I wouldn't be able to get access to the machine until August. The only thing in the contract that I agreed to was a June 30th delivery of my film, so I call my financiers and say that I'm going to have to give them the film in October. No problem, right? And they said, "Oh, no, no, impossible." What they had done was they had made release commitments and it just wasn't possible. In the same conversation they mentioned again Thierry Fremaux's interest in seeing the film and I quickly negotiated a deal with them which was that I would make a tape from my Avid to Beta, that somebody would fly the tape to Cannes, they'd show it to Fremaux and say yes or no immediately, a month before the official selection date. He has one day to make a decision, and that's it. But if I do this, the deal went with my financiers, then I would get until October.
You were counting on a rejection.
Yes! Who would take that deal? It's a million-to-one shot, the fucking thing didn't even have an ending shot. While the tape was flying around, I was thinking in my head that I'd keep editing the movie in the meantime–it was just this ploy to buy more time. And the prick says yes. Not only did he say yes, but he said, "It's such a beautiful movie." It's a raw cut with no ending, and now I have to make an ending because I can't film the ending because the racetrack I was going to shoot my ending on was booked all April. So I took bits and ends of film and sort of cobbled together from potential flashback images this long, bizarre ending. And I liked it, it was interesting, and it helped me get to the ending that I got to in this final cut–but I had to stop working and generate a print from this Beta.
The reception at Cannes was legendarily venomous.
I was there with Chloë and my financiers who were just overwhelmed, they were very modest people from Japan and they didn't understand what was happening. They weren't prepared for the evil and the gluttony and the filth that surrounds film marketing, which is all Cannes is, anymore. So we're in this giant cinema and the credits come up. "Directed, Written, Edited by Vincent Gallo"–and boos so loud that it was a rumble. It carried over the rumble of the motorcycle racing–then laughter started, then Roger Ebert started singing "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" and that sent the audience into a whole new spasm of derision. And, uh, it wasn't good. It wasn't a good moment. (laughs) But I've had that moment many times, I mean, what else is new? Vinnie Gallo the jerk from Buffalo, of course he's gonna have bad luck again, it's Scott Norwood all over again, the story of my life. But I could take it, I could take it. It hurts, but it's almost normal. The problem was that I had these other people involved this time. Usually the Vincent Gallo disaster is me vs. them, but this time it was us and them. The look on the financiers' faces, I mean, they basically were bankrupt at that moment. They knew that there would never be a nickel in the jar again for as long as they lived. I pulled my wallet out, I felt bad for them.
Was that the worst?
No, the worst was that I loved the film. I mean, I knew where it was weak, I knew where I wanted to cut, to tighten. The end, which I liked in a way, was ridiculous, I knew that, but I loved it and I felt good about it. I was so happy and then the audience, well, let's say that the reaction was mixed.
The Ebert flap was well documented, beginning with Ebert calling Brown Bunny the worst film to screen at competition at Cannes and you cursing a part of his anatomy.
We met a couple of days ago, me and Roger. Listen, I had prostititis–you know, bend over Mr. Gallo a couple of times a week. Just brutal, brutal, and I'm extremely sensitive in that area: No one's ever seen it, no one's ever touched it, so I had to have these massages and I had to come out of the doctor's office and it's just humiliating. I mean, you know that the nurses know what's happened to you. So I come out of the office and my phone rings and it's a reporter who says that Ebert said this and this and that and I said, "Tell that lowlife that I curse his prostate. Tell that asshole that I hope it grows to the size of a cantaloupe." And somehow this Paula Froelich who writes for the NEW YORK POST's Page Six column–this shining light, this piece of work that she is–interpreted prostate as colon, absent that day in school, and she wrote that I cursed Ebert's colon. Not that I was against that, but Jesus, I'm not the prince of darkness here, I don't believe in witchcraft–I'm afraid of the dark, for God's sake. I mean, I throw this curse, this hex on him with tongue in cheek, holding myself together after one of the most painful moments of my life, and now, in my intemperance, it's become this firestorm.
An insult, not voodoo.
Right, that's right, it's not like I was invoking the Manson girls but suddenly the Manson girls and their followers are coming up to me in Hollywood telling me that they'd read about the curse and they were proud of me. But anyway, it went back and forth, it got very nasty, and who knew that he'd actually get cancer a couple of weeks later? So I take the curse off of him and ten thousand cultists around Hollywood are giving me the evil eye.
But you met Mr. Ebert?
Yeah, a few days ago. I sat down with Roger and his wife and, let me say, a really nice guy, Roger, very easy to like. He's one of those guys in a great relationship where the husband and wife are just great friends. We chitchatted a little bit and at one point his wife wanted to talk about this hex thing. Roger said he didn't believe, she believed but he didn't–and she said that she knew a thing about hexes, she and her sisters, and they decided to bless me. Then Roger said that what he said about my film was the worst thing that he could have said about my film and maybe it was unnecessary and what I said in response was on equal level of horrible things and ultimately we sort of moved on, sort of buried the hatchet. I said to him after the whole interview something that I think he heard: I said that he has no power to undermine mainstream cinema–we both hated The Village, but it makes fifty million its first weekend. Who could stop it?
The Village also opened in close to 5,000 theatres behind a multi-million dollar ad campaign.
Right, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the thing, making it and advertising it, and distributing it–nothing will stop it opening, it goes beyond two thumbs up or down. But I told him that You, Roger, you can put out like a cigarette anything that isn't protected. Little films are very vulnerable. If you qualify your criticism, then other young filmmakers are not afraid to make it, distributors are not afraid to distribute it, producers, on and on. If you put the kibosh on things that are different, and provocative, and dangerous, then less and less of them are going to be made. If you say that Brown Bunny is the worst film that's ever been made, then the opportunities for small films with distinct voices–even if those voices are unpopular or irritating to the popular taste–are less and less. And I think he heard me. I hope he did.
You said after the Cannes screening that you were never going to make another film. What's your future in the cinema after a few months' reflection?
Making a film is like breaking up with a girl. It hurts, it hurts so bad, but in time that hurt starts to fade and you start to contextualize your feelings. "Yeah, it hurt, but here I am now with Sally," or whatever, you know. So when I'm asked that right after that screening, it's like the last thing that I can think of doing in that moment is making another movie. I'm not a career filmmaker and by that I'm not tearing down people who are, but I'm not Wes Anderson who can rent out a floor at the Chateau Marmont for a month to write my new screenplay–I have a life outside of filmmaking and after Buffalo '66, I genuinely thought I was done with making movies. But they pulled me back in. This Brown Bunny, it had something in it for me that I just had to say. I had to express it, it was in me and it ate its way out of me. I wished that it didn't, but it did and I was surprised to find myself shooting again.
Was it touch-and-go?
Yep. I was ready to quit several times along the way. Two things kept me going. My friend John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he composed several tracks for me for this movie. I just told him about the story and three days later he came up with this amazing soundtrack for an unshot film, and I was bound by my friendship with him, in my mind, to go ahead and make the movie. As it came along though, the songs seemed to fit less and less and I began to substitute his stuff for other music–the Gordon Lightfoot song, especially, brought me a lot of shit from John. He was mad at me for a day, but came back later and told me that he understood my choices. I listened to the album the whole time I was making the film, but it just didn't work in the film at all. It's ironic that it was so instrumental in the film being made.
And the second thing?
The second thing was Chloë Sevigny. I first saw her in like 1992, it was at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in Chelsea and she was in this goth outfit, just really weird and tricked-out and I thought to myself that this was the most beautiful girl that I had ever seen. I was in love with her instantly, went over and we talked and connected, and then she told me that she was sixteen and that put a block on that, amorously, for me. We ran into each other again in Paris in around 1995 or 1996, we were both there for photo shoots–that was the time when the fashion folks wanted to pair really pretty girls with scumbags for dramatic effect, so that's why I was there. And through some kind of weird/wonderful scheduling snafu, we ended up sharing a big hotel room. We were on the bed ten seconds and it was like suction, man, we were really into each other, kissing so sweetly. It was so sweet, truly, the most innocent, beautiful thing. And then fast asleep. I didn't talk to her again for six years. I saw her somewhere and thought that she dissed me–she was dating Harmony Korine at the time, I think, and I just started being very nasty and destructive with her. Anyone who'd listen, I'd tear her down, really mean, really mean things were said. But at my darkest time with Brown Bunny–and listen, other actresses had talked to me about it. Jennifer Jason Leigh had agreed already and Demi Moore had a talk with me in the back of her weird mini-van limo–the girl can smoke and drink coffee like a fucking pro… But it wasn't right. I wanted the perfect girl so I cast it to fate: I said if Chloë will do it, then I'll do the movie. I'll do it.
How did that conversation go?
I called her and she wanted to know why in the fuck I was calling her. This is six years of nastiness between us at this point. And I told her what I wanted, told her what the film was about, and Oh, by the way, remember that night in Paris when I did that thing to you but you didn't do it to me because you weren't so into it? Well, you might have to do that. On film. And we talked some more, I was very explicit with her about the whys and the hows–I told her that I wanted to essay male sexuality and self-loathing, that I wanted to film it in a way that was very frank and unadorned, and how it serves as this examination of that instant of self-hate after a guy orgasms when the guy realizes that he's with the wrong girl. And she, bless her heart, she understood it all and came on board. She said the sweetest thing at the end of that conversation, too, she said, "That thing that I didn't like so much in Paris? I've changed, I sort of like it now, this'll be fun." The weird, sad thing? All this stuff that she's been saying in the press, defending the movie like that, I'll never forget that. She's the only one, the only one. Lance Acord, he's never thanked me for giving him a shot on Buffalo '66. Christina Ricci–nothing but bile. But Chloë? She's an angel, and we haven't said a word to one another since Cannes.
I have to ask: Trouble Every Day was my favourite film from a couple of years ago–can you give me an anecdote?
An anecdote? Yeah, I got one. I broke up with my girlfriend the day before shooting started. I don't remember one thing about doing that film. I'm afraid that if I saw a frame of it, I'd dissolve.
The Brown Bunny hops into theatres across North America starting August 27th.
